blogdown: Creating Websites with R Markdown

The R Series

by Yihui Xie

This is the first book on how to create websites based on R Markdown. It makes it much easier to publish data analysis results and R computing/graphics output through websites. The book can be particularly useful to bloggers, and also generally useful to anyone who wants to create a professional personal website.

Hardcover

Published August 31, 2020

Reviews

[Yuan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book showcased the power of blogdown. You can easily create a website in 10 minutes using Netlify, Hugo,blogdown, rmarkdown.

Yihui Xie provided a step-by-step guide for the hugo-xmin theme. Upon finishing the book, you will have a much better understanding of how Hugo works, the standard structure (layouts, static, contents, public, config.toml), rules of overriding(layout/partials, layout/_default,static/css/custom.css), tips to add functionalities to your website (e.g., add math, add highlight.js, change layouts, add custom.css), etc.

However, you still need to be cautious when deploying your own site using the xmin-theme, as Hugo has upgraded a few times to version 0.60.1 (as today). The hugo-xmin was build under a very old version of Hugo.

[Azure · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great reference book if you're familiar with R and need to create a website. By following this guide, I was able to revamp my personal website and blog pretty quickly, and I'm really happy with the results.

(Only giving this 4* because some parts of the online text are out of date due to updates with Hugo. However, the author is working on updating those parts currently, so that may be a moot point in the future.)